Twayne
Sun May 11 16:58:08 PDT 2008
> "Big Al" <BigAl@nowhere.com> wrote in message
> news:ETlVj.1888$5b3.1589@trnddc05...
>> John Smith wrote:
>>> Yesterday I backed my XPpro up using both image and clone. Went to
>>> MicroSoft Updates and did their 'download and install'. I would
>>> rather have downloaded just the SP3 file, naturally, to have it
>>> available for a later possible update, but Microsoft prevents this,
>>> only offering the huge 300M version for download alone. The process
>>> of downloading and installing took nearly 40 minutes! My DSL is
>>> running at 2244Kbits when I tested just now so it wasn't download
>>> speed, there was just a LOT of moving and shakin to that SP3!. I
>>> was totally amazed when the blamed thing rebooted and came up
>>> normally after all that disk thrashing and Microsoft intrusiveness.
>>> I made a quick attempt to test all my software (there's a lot) and,
>>> far as I could see it was all working. Following the link XP SP3
>>> tech net forum:
>>>
http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=2010&SiteID=17
>>> that I got from this newsgroup I found many people having troubles
>>> with SP3. One complained of Windows Updates no longer working. So I
>>> tried that next and, sure enough it no longer worked. Then neither
>>> FireFox or IE7 would connect to internet. After considerable
>>> thrashing around I finally concluded that SP3 had changed something
>>> in my ZoneAlarm firewall. Once ZA blocked one Generic Host
>>> Processor 'intrusion' then neither browser would work till ZA was
>>> turned off. Setting the Generic Host Processor to 'Trusted' in ZA
>>> didn't help. But in Firewall, Zones my network adaptor card (which
>>> is connected to my DSL modem and thus the internet) was set to
>>> 'Internet'. I changed this to 'Trusted' and things started working.
>>> Set back to 'Internet' - things still worked, but only temporarily.
>>> Had to keep network card at 'Trusted' for system to work. That's the
>>> part of the elephant I'm feeling so far.
>
>> The 314 meg download is SP3. There is no smaller item. If you have
>> a fully updated system you only install 67 megs or so, probably the
>> new hotfixes and updates that were previously not distributed. But
>> SP3 = 300+ meg. If you have to do more than one PC on a slow
>> connection, you would be better off downloading and putting it on a
>> thumb or CD.
>
> I, too, have just installed SP3 in the same manner as the OP. I have
> kept very current with Windows Updates so expected the increase in
> files and harddrive space to be minimal. However, a comparison
> between a full harddrive backup before SP3 and another after
> installation of SP3 shows an increase of 2710 files totalling 0.6 GB.
> How come? Also, I am finding my whole system "clunky", e.g. boot-up
> takes longer, and programs take longer to load. In OE6 I am also
> getting that annoying message about "No connection to the internet is
> currently available. Retry" etc. I don`t have a very powerful
> computer and think that SP3 has made the OS so top-heavy, it is
> struggling to do "normal" things, especially if I am running a
> graphics program which is heavy on memory usage. If I find that I
> cannot take it anymore, can I uninstall SP3? I would, presumably,
> then have to re-install SP2 and then get all the updates since then. A
> daunting prospect.
> Thanks for listening!
> Kate
Have you emptied the Recycle bin?
Have you done a defrag?
Have you done a Disk Cleanup? (Start, run, accessories, system tools,
disk cleanup)
Do you still have the SP3 original download stuff still on your drive?
And all the temp files it created?
Restart your machine 3 times in a row; see if that doesn't help some
too. It's highly likely it will.
Yes, you can uninstall SP3 but ... SP3 is nothing but SP2 with all those
hotfixes included, so it's essentially the same thing with a few extra
features & gizmos added for good measure.
I don't know what your numbers show because of so little data along with
them, but I find them slightly suspicious and suspect something else is
at work that's confusing the issue on you.
Twayne